Sunday, March 22, 2009

The True Origin of Batman and the Watchmen Legacy

My five-year-old daughter, a big "Tiny Titans" fan, was explaining superhero origins to me today. She told me that Wonder Woman was "a woman. And she has a crown. So she's Wonder Woman."

And then she explained that Batman's first name is "Bat" and his last name is "Bat" and he's a man, so he's "Bat Man." And when I asked about Robin, she said, "well, robins eat bats right? Or, wait, do bats eat robins? They both have wings!"

In unrelated news, I've been thinking about the fallout from "Watchmen" not being a blockbuster, and I'm just totally baffled why any members of the audience would want it to be a blockbuster. Wouldn't it just help usher in that "dark" era of superhero movies that the monstrous success of "The Dark Knight" seemed to make inevitable? Maybe the relative failure of "Watchmen" will dissuade studios from wasting kazillions of dollars on movies where Superman has a mullet and dies. Or where Max Lord guns down Blue Beetle before getting his neck snapped by Wonder Woman.

The "Watchmen" experiment of the R-rated superhero film failed (and when students of mine asked me what I thought of the movie, they always said, "my friends said it's like a porno," so that's what the general public of teens and young adults seems to think of it as), and there won't be any more R-rated super heroes in the cinema anytime soon. Isn't that a good thing?

2) Who said that after "Batman Begins"? Give me a link. Because you know what I said after "Batman Begins"? Wow, Christian Bale does a really silly bat-voice, and Ra's al Ghul is the world's most ridiculous micro-manager (he really couldn't just let the bomb-train go without actually being on it?).

3) How can you say "if Watchmen had been a huge success, we'd still get good comic book movies like Spidey and Iron Man"? That doesn't make any sense on two levels: first, how do you know? And second, is the first Spider-Man movie good? Did you not see all the Green Goblin parts?

and when students of mine asked me what I thought of the movie, they always said, "my friends said it's like a porno,"

The friends of your students scare me. Either they're too sheltered or just plain ignorant. One sex scene and naked people don't make a porno. Is this at the College level? We truly are going backwards as a species.

That's not just a British saying, is it? "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater." Watchmen/Hypothetical grim 'n' gritty superhero movie(s) = bathwater; R-rated Superhero movies in general = baby.

Authority would end up being a 15 or 18*, I suspect, if done in actual film. You start having people's heads taken apart in the way which the Authority did and don't have Brian Hitch to make it charming, you end up with it being 15/18. 2000 AD was always 15/18s for 13 year olds, after all.

To be honest, the vast majority of superhero work I'd be interested in seeing in film would be 15/18, from Zenith to Sleeper.

I agree, The Dark Knight was not only nihilistic, but stupidly so. The best superhero movies have fun with the premise—Superman II, perhaps even Spider-Man II (once the "origin" crap is out of the way).

I'd like to see Authority, Zenith, Sleeper, and that sort too...but only if they're done right, and the rush to darken the superhero film on the big screen (after Dark Knight and had Watchmen been a big success) seems to echo exactly what led to such hollow and crass comics as...well, pretty much the bulk of the Marvel/DC output of the 1990s.

I'm not saying no R-rated superheroes, I'm saying it might be a good thing there's no rush to make them just BECAUSE they're hardcore.

Yes. It is a good thing. I hope this doesn't just dissuade Hollywood from making dark superhero films, but gives the movies a bit of caution in their approach to adapting comics, period. The love affair between the media that has broken out in the past 4-5 years is something I see as not being healthy for the medium, with an incredible amount of mainstream creators forgetting they work in a truly original medium and just trying to do movies on paper, while every other independent book launched is an illustrated movie pitch.

I think the Watchmen movie is a good capstone to the past decade's continuing merger of films and comics' respective worlds. With the million copies of Watchmen sold in the movie's wake, I think a lot of new readers will be, if not frequenting shops in the future, certainly interested in reading the occasional "graphic novel". I'd like to put forth a modest proposal that comics step away from this Hollywood love affair with a much-expanded readership and take the next decade to reacquaint with what makes them our favorite medium. When the comic book's bag of tricks has been expanded and updated in, oh, let's say 2020, they'll be ready for another flash across the silver screen.

But enough is enough for now... let's relax for awhile before we do great injustice to more works of literature...

Slightly off topic, but when a really successful film adaptation of a book comes out, do sales on that book, or of that authors books, go up? I'm serious - that seems to be the closest correlation the theory that comic sales will somehow go up if superhero movies do well. Does anybody have any numbers, or know where to find them?

About Me

Timothy Callahan is an educator and a writer. He has written books, like Grant Morrison: The Early Years, and edited books like Teenagers from the Future. He used to co-host the weekly Splash Page podcast, but now he mostly spends his free time creating role-playing games like CRAWLJAMMER and the upcoming SUPERWAR.